You are browsing the Blog for Speaking Up.

I am a county board supervisor here in Wisconsin, Dunn County District 17. I am writing to urge you to vote against the ACHA as presented. The closed doors, secret meetings process for creating this bill has been catastrophically flawed and is a perfect example of the worst of Washington DC.

The American people deserve an open and aboveboard process for the writing of a bill that will impact 1/6th of the American economy and directly affect millions of peoples’ health. They do not deserve to be completely shut out of the process, and passing this bill as it stands and after this process is likely to create a kind of rage against the government that this country hasn’t seen in generations.

As a local politician I have seen the anger of my constituents when they feel their voices aren’t being heard and I can’t imagine how much greater that rage will be among people who will see their healthcare taken away or greatly increased in price by a bill that was produced in silence and secrecy that was then rushed through the process.

All of the polling suggests that this bill is already deeply unpopular and that the more the people hear about it the less they like it. That’s not going to change if it is passed without proper hearings and the chance for the people to be heard. It is going to become infinitely worse.

I believe that this is a bill that will do great harm to your constituents and mine and I am certain that the process that has produced it will generate massive anger in the American people, anger of the sort that is corrosive to the very foundations of democracy. I implore you not to vote for this bill as it stands and certainly not to do so given the process that produced it.

I don’t often post political things here on my blog because this webpage is primarily about the author side of my life even though I am also an elected county supervisor here in Wisconsin, or what most people think of as a county commissioner. This is one of the rare times where I’m going to go ahead and violate that soft rule and put on my politician hat for a few moments and make a couple of public endorsements.

First and foremost, I’m going to endorse Hillary Clinton for the office of president. I’m doing this both because I believe that she will make an excellent president and because I believe Donald Trump represents a genuine threat to American Democracy and that this election is a defining ethical moment for American voters.

On the one hand we can vote Hillary Clinton, an incredibly smart and capable woman who has dedicated her life to public service. She is a hard worker, a deep thinker about policy, and a tireless advocate for the most vulnerable among us. She has made mistakes, but I know of no human being who hasn’t and I strongly believe that she has learned from hers and used them as a spur to drive herself to do better the next time.

On the other hand we have Donald Trump, a man who has spent his lifetime building monuments to his ego, and who has built a campaign on feeding the worst impulses in the American character. From day one hatred, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, and misogyny have formed the underpinnings of his pitch to the American people and he has doubled down on those themes at every step of the way. The revelations of October are no surprise to those who have actually been paying attention to what he has said. This is who Donald Trump is, a narcissistic egotist who would cheerfully burn the world down if he thought it might warm his hands.

The choice between the two is very clear, and it my sincere hope that we will soon have the opportunity to address Hillary Clinton as Madam President.

I am also going to endorse Russ Feingold for Senator of my own state of Wisconsin. Again I have a number of reasons for doing this. Number one, I believe that we need to send Hillary Clinton to the White House with a firm majority in both the house and senate.

We have seen what a Republican majority looks like in both of those bodies under the current political climate, and it is a never-ending string of opposition for opposition’s sake. The current Republican party has decided that its own political fortunes are more important than the health and well-being of the country, and they must lose and lose badly if they are ever to have any chance of returning to being a responsible political party who advances the country’s interests over their own.

I do not say this lightly or with any happiness. I believe that it is important to have a sane and responsible conservative party to keep those of us on the liberal side of things sharp and honest. Sadly, that party does not currently exist, and our current Senator Ron Johnson is a perfect example of the worst of today’s obstructionist Republican party. He needs to be retired.

So I am happy to endorse Russ Feingold, who has served in the Senate before under both Republican and Democratic presidents with honor and distinction. I don’t agree with every decision he has made, and some of them have irritated me deeply, but I believe that he has always made his choices based on what he believes is best for the country and best for Wisconsin.

As a middle aged straight white guy, I don’t get trolled on social media very often. But I see it happen to friends all the time. That’s why, when I saw a particular tweet go by from Mary Robinette Kowal, I saw an opportunity to play a twitter game with a friend, and well, you’ll see it below. I think what we ended up with is something that’s more useful than a game.

Mary’s post on the exchange is here. As something of a palate cleanser here’s a picture of Mary and I as best man and matron of honor at the vow renewal for our friends Michael and Lynne Thomas. I don’t know about any of the rest of you, but even briefly playing the troll makes me feel more than a little filthy.

I have been thinking a great deal about fear over the past few days. Fear and how it affects your life and your writing. I think this is true for any art, but I am a writer, so that’s how I’m going to frame this.

If you are going to succeed at writing you are going to write a certain amount of crap. You will write sentences that clunk and scenes that will later embarrass you. Some of your mistakes are likely to get published, preserved forever in amber where others will be able to see your failures and point and laugh. If you are especially lucky, people will still be mocking your mistakes long after they bury you.

You cannot let the fear of that stop you. Fear will kill your hopes deader than any horrible sentence or purple paragraph or complete failure. Fear keeps you from trying, and not trying means never succeeding. You cannot win if you don’t get in the game.

It’s hard, I know. I’ve been there. I was recently described as fearless by an old friend, which is part of what got me thinking about this.* That may be how it looks from the outside, but it’s not quite true. I have been afraid many times, both in this business and in my daily life. I am not fearless.

What I am is brutally brutally stubborn. I refuse to let fear stop me from doing what I want to do. I attempt things knowing that I will fail some of the time and that it will hurt.

Physically, I fear the bruises and cuts and burns that come with attempting hard things in the real world, but I won’t let that stop me from working my body or climbing a mountain or building and welding. In writing, I fear looking like a hack or a fool or a wannabe.

I fear these things, but I will not let that stop me. I have the scars and the awful reviews to prove it. But, what I also have is things that I have built, a body that is fit, books and stories that I am proud of. I have good reviews to go along with the bad and the respect of some of my peers.

I would have none of that if I let the fear stop me from trying. If I let the fear stop me from failing. If I let the fear stop me from succeeding.

This is another one of those things that men aren’t supposed to talk about, like crying. Which is exactly why I’m feeling the need to talk about it now. Before I get started, let me note that I’m not asking for sympathy here, I’m sharing this entirely in the hope that it will make a few other people with the same issues feel less alone.

I suffer from low level dismorphia. It’s not severe and it’s not debilitating, but it’s very real and it has significant impacts on my life and self image. Without making a fairly large effort I don’t really see what I look like. Instead I see how much I diverge from what I think I should look like.

At the moment I’m down about thirty pounds from my heaviest weight of 218. At 190 I weigh what I weighed when I got out of high school nearly thirty years ago, and—though I was a fairly serious martial arts type athlete back then—I’m actually in better shape now. I’ve lost thirty pounds total but more like forty pounds of fat, and I’ve packed on a lot of muscle. Honestly, even when I was heavier I wasn’t in terrible shape or really all that fat.

By any objective measure I look much better and am in much better shape than I was five years ago.

But I don’t see it. Not unless I actively try to do so. Even then, it’s hard. What I see is the five pounds or so of body fat that I have left, and, if I let it, it makes me angry and depressed and pushes all my self-loathing buttons.

Best part? The closer I get to the ideal I see in my head, the worse the dismorphia gets. I think that’s because I can see the me that I think I’m supposed to be more easily as the bits that don’t fit that image get peeled away.

One particularly charming aspect of the whole thing is that it’s not actually possible for me to make my body fit the image in my head. Not even if I lose that last five pounds of fat and and pack on another fifteen of muscle. That’s because the image in my head isn’t just in perfect shape, it’s also a fundamentally different body type. I am a human tank, broad shouldered and thick everywhere—a natural born weightlifter—while the image in my head is more the dancer or runner type.

Nothing I can do is going to transform me into that person. Yet it’s what my brain thinks I ought to be. I suspect that this image comes from a combination of media images, the year I spent in that shape after I hit puberty and before I filled out, and the decade I spent immersed in theater and dance between the ages of twelve and twenty-two. Dance and theater are major breeding grounds for dismorphia.

At forty-five I have much better mental and emotional tools to deal with the dismorphia and what it wants to do to my sense of self, but it’s a battle that I have to fight and win anew every single day. It never gives up, it never goes away, and it’s never ever farther away than the next mirror. It has danced me along the edge of the land of eating disorders, it daily takes the edge off my joy at being as fit as I am now, and I know that it will always be waiting for me on the bad days.

This is one of those things guys aren’t supposed to talk about, which is, I think, a good reason to talk about it. I cry easily. Always have. Sacrifice scene in a book? I bawl. Poignant story on the news. Bawl. That’s under normal circumstances.

In the last 12 months, I’ve said a final goodbye to one of my oldest friends, a beloved aunt, and two of the finest dogs it’s ever been my pleasure to associate with. I’ve also had my most successful year ever in terms of my career and ability to produce art that I’m proud of. It’s been a huge emotional roller coaster, and it’s a rare day where I don’t at least tear up a touch and go rough throated.

My point? That that’s fine. Crying has been a safety valve and a solace. I miss those I love that I have lost, and the tears are honest tribute. It’s part of saying goodbye to Mike and Lee, and to Cabal and Moonbear.

My friend, the fantastic photographer Kyle Cassidy tweeted about a men reading women in comics tumblr designed to dispel the myth that men aren’t interested in reading comics by and about strong, diverse, interesting women. As an author who feels it’s very important to have strong smart women characters in my books I decided this was a project that I wanted to support. I thought it would be fun to send in a picture of me reading Birds of Prey since I was recently drawn back into reading comics in part by the work of the wonderful writing and stories of the Gail Simone run on Birds of Prey. So I called up another fabulous photographer friend Matthew A Kuchta who did my most recent couple of author photos as well as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe shoot with my wife and I at Neil Gaiman’s lamppost, and I asked him if he’d be interested. We decided that since I did a lot of my comics reading while inverting after a workout it would be fun to play off that. This picture, which I love, is the result of that call.

The kind of gendered hate speech that Cat Valente talks about here, the kind that gets heaped on the heads of women who express strong opinions on the internet, is never acceptable, and she is absolutely right to call it out. I strongly agree with what Jim Hines and John Scalzi have had to say about the topic as well. I’m a man, which means I don’t generally get subjected to this shit, but I can call it out when I see it and I can absolutely let the world know that I don’t and won’t give the people who are making this kind of attack a pass. If you’re wondering what makes me put this post up now, it’s that Abi Sutherland over at Making Light just reminded me that it’s important that those of us of the male persuasion also need to speak up.